Mailing Lists

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Accessing the Mailing Lists

The public mailing lists are open for both viewing and participation.

The archives can be accessed here. If you wish to join the discussion, please read on.

Mailing List Culture

The PostgreSQL community exists world-wide on our mailing lists. As you dive into our community, you will encounter people with wildly varying levels of expertise for databases, software development and system administration. Excellent technical and professional advice is given freely on the mailing lists, but there is no guarantee or expectation that anyone can solve any particular problem. Flaming or personal attacks are not tolerated on our mailing lists, IRC or related forums connected to the postgresql.org site.

Above all, the PostgreSQL community's expectation is that each person treats the other with respect, and grants each other the benefit-of-the-doubt when it comes to terse or critical language. The Robustness Principle applies to participation in our community: Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.

That said, our community is known for its aggressive and technical discussion style. For those unfamiliar with our community, our discussions can come across as insulting or overly critical. Please keep in mind that as a new contributor, you are encountering a new culture. Every culture has different rules about appropriate behavior, social norms, and expectations. Much like when learning a new language or visiting a new, unfamiliar country, your experiences while joining the PostgreSQL community will undoubtably include an "adjustment cycle". That can and likely will include high and low moments, friendly or otherwise.

As with any encounter with unfamiliar culture, you must take some time to get acquainted. Take extra time to communicate clearly. Ask for clarification if you're confused or a response doesn't make sense to you. Be careful to avoid personal attacks if someone makes a mistake. If there's one universal constant, it is that everyone makes mistakes.

Remember that we are a learning community, and with few exceptions, people are communicating with the intention of learning, sharing and refining ideas.

Email etiquette mechanics

Signatures that include "confidentiality notices" are useless in the context of PostgreSQL mailing lists. All messages to our lists are archived publicly, are immediately available worldwide and will not be removed from our archives. Please remove the notices from your email to our lists, particularly when posting code that you wish to be contributed or shared with our community.

When replying, please be respectful and use appropriate quoting. See the Mailing List Etiquette FAQ for details about what constitutes appropriate quoting when replying to mailing lists.

Our mailing lists are generally set to "reply to sender", but the preferred way to participate in threads is to "reply all". That means that you'll include both the email address of the sender and the mailing list in your response. Also, please do not send HTML-enriched email to the mailing lists.

Finally, our community generally does not "top post" in response to mailing list threads (See Wikipedia: Top Postingfor a definition of top posting).

Using the discussion lists

You can send an email directly to any of the mailing lists, without subscribing first.
Any responses you receive or send should be sent to the list and CC correspondents.

If you wish to receive the mail traffic sent to a list, you can join using the subscribe form. You should receive an email in response from the majordomo mailing list manager software that handles the lists. If you wish change the various settings associated with your subscription or unsubscribe, you can do so using either the web interface, or by sending commands to majordomo via email at majordomo@postgresql.org.

If you follow discussion through the web interface instead of subscribing,
you will at some point wish to reply to a message sent to the list. Do not simply copy
the message body and paste it into a message with a similar subject as a way to join the conversation.
The mailing list relies on the "In-Reply-To" mail header in order to associate individual messages
to their thread. If you don't know how to add this header manually, you should instead make use
of the "raw" link provided on every message view to download the message as a file
(in mbox format), then import it into your favorite email client and use the usual "Reply All"
way of responding to mailing list messages. To download the "raw" file a simple authentication is
required to protect it against bots. The username / password to use is provided in the prompt
but some recent browsers do not display this message. In that case, try a different browser.

Overview of discussion lists

We have two primary lists. The pgsql-general@postgresql.org is for developers, DBAs and admins who have a question or problem using PostgreSQL.
pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org is for developers to submit and discuss patches, or for bug reports or issues with unreleased version (development snapshots, beta or release candidates), and for discussion about database internals. We also have the pgsql-novice@postgresql.org list if you would like to try posting a question a smaller list, with a group of people who are there specifically to answer very basic questions.

If you are primarily interested in performance tuning, benchmarking or case studies from existing users regarding performance, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org is a great list to join.

If you're interested in contributing to website maintenance or editing, or system administration of PostgreSQL infrastructure, join the pgsql-www@postgresql.org mailing list.

If you have something to contribute to the PostgreSQL documentation, join the pgsql-docs@postgresql.org mailing list. The documentation is always in need of copy editors, testers and example generation.

If you're interested in staffing booths at conferences, giving talks at conferences, starting a user group or participating in a user group, join the pgsql-advocacy@postgresql.org mailing list. We are always in need of booth volunteers, speakers, case study writers and bloggers.

We also have User Group mailing lists, language-specific lists and some other specific projects with their own communities. You can find a comprehensive list of these at: http://www.postgresql.org/community/lists/